Generating new concepts in global urban studies: Thinking through (and beyond?) gentrification
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: MatthiasBernt's book, The Commodification Gap, is a landmark in the now very long history of gentrification studies and has something new and distinctive to say in this crowded field.It is also much more than just another book on gentrification as it provides a thoughtful and rigorously developed example of how urban studies might approach building insights and stretching concepts through attending to the variety of experiences across the globe.For those who are eager for an inventive and generative phase of conceptualisation in global urban studies, the one disappointment is that we start and end within the frame of a very well-worn concept, even if, following Bernt, this can be seen as a "multiplicity" of many types of gentrification.To move beyond this concept, to give up on the privileged theoretical object, "gentrification", would need a different methodological and theoretical approach than Bernt adopts.Bernt moves us definitively in that direction by acknowledging that gentrification is a concept or abstraction, not a circulating phenomenon or an obvious or pre-given object as such.In this sense we might be drawn to reassign the empirical observations to alternative concepts, abandoning this term and thinking of others.Nonetheless, as urban studies moves forward with methodological experimentation in support of more global analyses, this book provides much food for thought, and is a most important analytical and methodological contribution to the wider project of globalising urban studies.
Source: Dialogues in Urban Research
Author: Jennifer Robinson
Institution: University College London
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4400864309